Luther and Lutheranism

Martin Luther was eight years old when Christopher Columbus set sail from Europe and landed in the Western Hemisphere. Luther was a young monk and priest when Michaelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel in Rome...

ELCA Good Gifts Catalog

Assignment Process

Assignment completes candidacy for all people, including those ordained in another Lutheran church or Christian tradition, moving them toward first call and admittance to the appropriate roster in the ELCA...

Joint Observance

The ELCA Conference of Bishops' Ecumenical and Inter-Religious Liaison Committee and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs Committee commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation by signing a joint statement during a Lutheran-Catholic service of Common Prayer.

Reformation 500

Martin Luther posted his “Ninety-Five Theses” in Wittenberg on Oct. 31, 1517, and the resulting debate about Christian teaching and practice led to changes that have shaped the course of Western Christianity for almost 500 years.

Editor's Introduction: Lutherans and Sanctification

Carmelo Santos

09/20/2017

[1] In this issue of the JLE we continue to explore the role
of sanctification in the thought of Luther vis-à-vis that of John Wesley. The
original setting of these papers was the January 2017 meeting of the Lutheran
Ethicists Gathering which included an actual dialogue between Methodist and
Lutheran ethicists.

[2] In
the first article, Svend Andersen, professor
at the Department of Theology in the University of Aarhus, Denmark, compares and contrasts Wesley’s explicit elaboration of sanctification
as moral perfection with Luther’s more implicit understanding of sanctification
especially as it finds expression in his discussions of the role of love in the
life of the believer and the work of the Holy Spirit in the economy of salvation.
Andersen proposes that in the same way there is a “happy exchange” (he prefers
to call it a “role exchange”) at the forensic level, there also is a “role
exchange” at the ethical level, which is the proper work of the Holy Spirit in
and through the believer. He surmises that:

[T]he spiritignites my heart in the sense that it
creates a capacity to emotionally identify with other human beings, and not
least of all identify with his or her suffering – and a power to work for the
remedy of his or her need. Calling this sanctification means that even if the
understanding, emotion and acting are my own, they are at the same time brought
about by an external power, linked to being confronted with the Jesus story”
(Andersen, ¶ 36).

[3] Thus,
for Andersen, the decisive difference between Wesley’s and Luther’s
understanding of sanctification does not seem to lie so much in its actual
outward expression in the life of the believer but in the intention underlying
it. For Luther, the intention is oriented outwardly; the point is not the
holiness of the believer but the well being of the neighbor.

[4] In the second article on this issue, Mathew Riegel, bishop of the West Virginia-Western Maryland Synod
of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, offers an erudite exploration of
the place of justification and sanctification in the thought of Luther. In a
polemic against what he views as a serious misunderstandings of the role of
justification in Luther’s theological corpus, he argues for justification as a
penultimate vis-à-vis the ultimate work proper to God’s original intention for
the human person, viz., eternal life. As Riegel puts
it:

The proper end of humanity, the joy and
blessedness of perfect sanctification in some future spiritual life, is secured
by the promises of Christ in response to the Fall. Thus, these promises, for
Luther, take on a thoroughly eschatological cast. As such, the promises of
Christ point us, principally, to teleological sanctification and only
subordinately to justification (¶
16).

[5]
Justification was the divine response to the contingency of the Fall, argues Riegel. But the end goal of God’s purpose for the human
creature shines through an eschatological understanding of sanctification,
where we are promised the beatific vision of holiness and full communion with
God in eternity. Could it be, then, that sanctification, read in eschatological
key, and not justification, is the chief article of the faith? The reader will
have to decide.

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